Former NPR chief exec Vivian Schiller will keep her April 1 speaking engagement at the University of Texas’s international symposium on online journalism, even though she accepted the invitation prior to her March 9 resignation. U-Texas J-School professor Rosental Alves, organizer of the annual conference, reached out to Schiller after her abrupt departure and asked her to discuss her vision for online journalism, based on her experiences at NPR and NYTimes.com. “The most important work that she has done was moving NPR into the digital age,” Alves tells The Daily Texan, UT’s student newspaper. “That experience alone would be very relevant for us who are concerned with the future of journalism in this country.”

Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there....

The Capitol Hill hearing on alternative means to fund public broadcasting, which had been announced for April 6, has been canceled due to scheduling issues, House Appropriations Committee spokesperson Jennifer Hing tells Current.

After last week’s House vote on federal funding for public radio, the debate continued to rage on op-ed pages and blogs. Here’s a sampling from pubcasting veterans and other observers with special insights: William Drummond, a founding editor of Morning Edition who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley’s J-School, remakes his case for policymakers to forcibly “wean public broadcasting off the federal dole.” [Drummond mentions his 1993 commentary in Current.] Fox News pundit and former NPR news analyst Juan Williams agrees that pubcasting should lose its federal aid, but for different reasons. In today’s edition of The Hill he writes of “the culture of elitism that has corroded NPR’s leadership.”

“New Public Media Networks: What’s Becoming and What Might Be” is a new animated video from American University’s Center for Social Media that touts the importance of public broadcasting by focusing on one household. In it, members of the Cardozo family — Jenna and Jose, their 10-year-old daughter Liv and twins Max and Carla, 17 — each use pubmedia in very different but beneficial ways, from having fun on PBS Kids to addressing community issues through involvement in the “Not in Our Town” outreach. Max even creates an app that spreads worldwide via his local pubcasting station. The eight-minute film was created by Jessica Clark, director of the Future of Public Media Project at the center, and Ellen Goodman, law professor and co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law.

After a nearly two-hour battle pitting fiscal conservatism against the value of publicly funded media, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill forbidding stations to use CPB funds to acquire NPR programming or pay network dues.

Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there. The two NPR fundraisers didn’t get the $5 million donation that was discussed by their lunch partners, and the president of NPR didn’t pose for a photo accepting a phony check, but those were the better results of the lunch meeting. They couldn’t have expected that a hidden-camera recording of their talk with two prospective donors would cost Schiller his next job, put Liley on administrative leave, trigger the ouster of NPR’s president and severely undercut support for federal aid to public broadcasting.

WNET/Thirteen in New York City is launching a local news show, MetroFocus, on Memorial Day, the New York Times is reporting. “One of the futures of public television is making local connections,” station President Neal Shapiro told the paper. “We’ve done a great job of being a national producer; we can do a much better job of being a local producer.” It’ll launch as a website, then a 30-minute monthly or weekly show, then a mobile app.

Did Garrison Keillor, that red-sneakered, 68-year-old host of A Prairie Home Companion, really announce his retirement plans in an interview published last week? You decide. Here are your clues: On March 16, AARP issued a press release, “Public Radio Legend Garrison Keillor Announces Retirement in AARP Bulletin Exclusive Interview.” In the question-and-answer dialogue on AARP’s website, Keillor said, “I am planning to retire in the spring of 2013, but first I have to find my replacement.” Soon after AARP’s piece appeared online, his longtime broadcaster and distributor, Bill Kling, president of American Public Media, told an MPR blogger that “Garrison has been talking about things like this for the last couple of years and when Garrison says it, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that morning’s musings.”

NPR is facing the most serious political crisis in its history with no chief executive to speak for it, no chief fundraiser to make sure its new building can be finished, and no chief journalist to rebuff or heed criticism of its newsroom. “People feel that they’ve been let down, and there’s this vacuum at NPR, and what’s next?” said Dave Edwards, chair of the NPR Board. “Those emotions are felt by people in NPR’s building, at stations and by board members. The board has an obligation to stabilize things. That’s what we’re working on.” Joyce Slocum, general counsel and senior v.p.

How much progress has public radio made toward its goal of growing its audience by 50 percent by 2020? There are bright spots in the first follow-up to Station Resource Group’s 2010 report that laid out aspirational goals and tactics for increasing the use, reach and diversity of public radio listenership, but also some set-backs. “In 2010 more people tuned in a public radio station in a typical week and more people used public media’s online services than ever before,” write Terry Clifford and Tom Thomas, SRG co-directors and co-authors of the CPB-backed research project. “But the amount of listening – the average audience at any one time – declined significantly, principally due to changes in measurement methodology.

Mykalai Kontilai, whose controversial past stoked headlines when he bought Nightly Business Report last August, has hired Paramount Media Advisors to explore options “from selling a minority stake up to selling the entire company,” the New York Times is reporting. Sources familiar with the situation says Kontilai’s company, NBR Worldwide, is exploring a strategic alliance with a bigger partner through a minority investment, although a sale of Nightly Business Report “would also be considered.”

Is NPR’s “complete lack of a strategy to save itself” in the current crisis what’s actually doing the most damage to the network? Media analyst Howard Kurtz explores that possibility for Newsweek today (Sunday March 20). He said that NPR staffers flown in for a recent meeting in Washington “groaned when executives said it would be too risky for them to aggressively defend NPR, and that perhaps they should get media training for Joyce Slocum, who took over on an interim basis after the firing of CEO Vivian Schiller” (Current, March 9). This American Life host Ira Glass also criticized NPR’s reaction — or, rather, the lack of it.

Bob Davis, editor of the Anniston (Ala.) Star, undertook an experiment to determine if the “enlightened” broadcasting content that President Lyndon Johnson envisioned when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is being provided by commercial radio, thus eliminating the need for NPR. “Friday morning, I probed this idea by randomly scanning the radio dial, something my family can attest is a specialty of mine,” Davis said. What he found may not be surprising, but it is amusing.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision last week to replace the entire seven-member Educational Television Commission has pubcasting supporters worried, reports The State newspaper. “What worries me is if people go in there thinking they know what ETV means, thinking it’s just Masterpiece Theater, and they make decisions without being educated,” Caroline Whitson, president of Columbia College and the fundraising ETV Endowment Board, told the paper. “They could make decisions that long-term have very detrimental effects on this state without realizing what they’ve done.” ETV, created in 1960, operates a statewide network of 11 television stations, eight radio stations and a closed-circuit telecommunications system used by schools, government agencies and businesses, the paper said.